Who is the best Star Trek Engineer?

[Starrtom]

There are 3 generations of engineers, but who do you consider to be the best, and would want on your team when things go wrong:

1.0 Tucker (Enterprise)
2.0 Scotty (TOS)
3.0 Le Forge (TNG)
4.0 O'Brian (DS9)
5.0 Torres (Voyager)

My pick would be O'Brian, I just think he is a bit more versitile then the others.

What would be yours?

[General Jumper One]

Scotty!! Duh!

[iheartshep]

Trip Tucker!

IHS

[P-90_177]

Either La Forge or O'Brian.................but I disqualify La Forge as I disqualify all Next Gen characters for being TOO perfect.

So..........O'Brian it is.

[General Jumper One]

Either La Forge or O'Brian.................but I disqualify La Forge as I disqualify all Next Gen characters for being TOO perfect.

So..........O'Brian it is.

O'Brian was originally Next Gen...

[jelgate]

Senior Chief Petty Officer Miles O'Brien

[P-90_177]

O'Brian was originally Next Gen...

But he wasn't a main character. Besides.......even in TNG he was one of the few characters that wasn't depicted as being perfect....... And one of the only secondary characters with a personality.

[Utopia!]

Scotty !

[DigiFluid]

Scotty, no contest.

[maneth]

Scotty's too misogynistic for me. Trip Tucker!

[nx01a]

Scotty could work miracles even when he said he 'couldn't do it' because there's 'not enough power, captain'!

Scotty's too misogynistic for me. Trip Tucker!

He's a borderline alcoholic, too, but he's still a damn good engineer.

[DigiFluid]

What?! Scotty was never misogynistic!

[nx01a]

What?! Scotty was never misogynistic!

I've yet to see a good chunk of TOS, but I was wondering about that comment, too. Anyhoo, his attitudes toward women and alcohol have nothing to do with his engineering skill.

[rien]

Correct me if i am wrong but didnt Scotty tell La Forge that he always exaggerated how bad things were and added an hour onto the repair time so that he would look great when he managed to easily fix whatever dire problem they were in long before the deadline for repairs

La Forge acted as though being chief engineer was one big joyride with him in the drivers seat it was creepy, Scotty only seemed to pop up when there was an engineering emergency or alcohol, and the Trip ship was always having kinky engineering problems being newly commisioned and the first of its kind and all.

I would choose O'Brien simply for the reason that imho the others only really deal with important and 'out of the ordinary' events. Every now and then they will have an episode where an everyday routine part of the ship will malfunction but usually they handle problems involving weird phenomena, newly discovered alien tech, problems with the warp core or the holodeck that threaten the entire ship. The other stuff gets delegated to the background characters.

O'Brien is the only one who seems to deal with the routine day to day stuff like fixing replicators, non-threatening holosuite malfunctions, broken turbolift with people trapped inside or other basic little things that are helpful for the day to day running of a ship/station but not critically important. Also being an engineer is clearly his job wherea his hobby is fighting losing battles in the holosuites at Quarks. This makes the character seem more real imho

Edit: I totally forgot Torres but somehow I dont feel guilty about that

[knowles2]

I think Torres is probably the best engineer, shame she did not developed that much of a personality, she was one of the brains behind Voyager version of Slipstream drive an manage to maintain voyager with out retreating a starbase after every incident like Gordi an the enterprise did, an she did do some brilliant engineering in Voyage, doing stuff like temporally stabilising that Worm Hole, not even Data or Gordi thought up of way of doing that. An she also co developed that Warp 10 drive as well. An did extensive work on space fold drive tech, which she got working on a space shuttle, something else which Starfleet back home could never get to work.

O'brien was probably joint, Not only did he get Cardassian an Federation technology working well together, reverse engineering it as he went, reprogramming the computer core, he also solved the Defiant class major design flaw, which I am sure plenty of other federation engineers fail to solve. An manage to turn DS9 into probably the most lightly armed space station in the galaxy to a absolute fortress, with removing a single bulk head or generally making a mess of anything.

I Scotty relied on Spock to much, Spock was the brains Scotty was the button pusher. He could not even solve that warp stability problem on his own, why torres help build an design brand new engines, to the federation anyway.


Gordi did at least made extensive modifications the Enterprise engines, an change a lot of the configuration, impressing the original designer.


Trip I do not think got the chance to display his capabilities during the series.

So my ranking, purely on technical brilliance in solving problems goes like this

Torres - O'brien
Goedi
Scotty
Trip (he was to reliant of T'pol her vulcan knowledge to solve problems an rarely did anything by himself)